Hello from Finland! We are the class 6A from Otava school. You can call
us Hungry Birds after the greatest mobile phone game Anrgy Birds made by
Finnish company Rovio (Yes, the game comes from Finland like Nokia
phones). We come from Mikkeli which is a small town in Eastern Finland.
Our school have 190 pupils and 13 teachers. Our pupils are 7- 12 years
old and we are the oldest. If you wan't you can visit our schools web
site (http://otavankoulu.blogspot.com). It is of course written in
Finnish but you can try to translate it with Google. In this week we are
going to introduce our school and Finland and of course tell you
something about history of school meals in Finland.

Today we decided to tell how Finnish kids normally eat on their school
day. First almost everyone of us eats breakfast at 7 or 8 am. Breakfast
is usually bread, cereals, fruit or yoghourt and glass of milk or juice.
Even some eats porridge as a breakfast. But sometimes when you sleep too
long and you are in a hurry you can pass the breakfast. At school we eat
our lunch an 11 am. Our school end normally at 1.30 or 2.30 pm and we
eat nomally small afternoon snack at home. It is usually bread or fruit.
Some of us may eat some candy and drink some lemonade or energy drink
but that's not very healthy to do every day. We usually eat dinner at
5pm. The dinner is mostly cooked at home. And in the evening we usually
eat some snack before we go to sleep.

Our school lunch is served every day at 11am. We think that our food is
quite normal finnish food. Tomorrow we will tell more how the school
lunch system works here in Finland. But for us the lunch doesn't cost
anything, it's like a benefit. We always can take as much as we like,
and we also have to taste everything even we don't like it. Today in our
school canteen there was one of our favourite dishes: spaghetti
bolognese and salad.

There is always water, skimmed milk or sour milk to
drink. There is also bread everyday but the bread is mostly crisp bread.
Today the spaghetti was integral pasta which is of course healthier.
There is also a very small amount of fat and salt in the sauce.

Hi! I'm a Finn too (though not in Finland at the moment) and pupils/students don't eat breakfast at school, they eat it at home. Usually schools just provide a free lunch. There are some special shools, but those are exceptions.

I'm so happy to see a Finnish class posting here, as others have said, I'm proud to be a Finn and proud of Hungry birds! :)

I believe the breakfast is at home.. :) Also from finland, woo! and that bolognese looks very familiar what we used to have, but that's like, ages ago.. :D and I hated it. used to call it ratsauce.. :DDD but it's free.

LARGE portion of spaghetti. Little tiny portion (perhaps two bites) of salad.

After reading, "We always can take as much as we like, and we also have to taste everything even we don't like it" and "(everyone didn't eat their salad!)" I rather suspect this lunch belonged to someone who wasn't fond of salad. :)

Interesting! Looks a lot like the spaghetti and meat sauce they served many moons ago when I was in elementary school in the U.S. One question, though. Is "sour milk" what's known as "buttermilk" in the states?

I'm sorry. I love the website, love Mary's Meals and I love Veg. But I have to be honest with you - that looks disgusting. I'm glad they don't charge you for it, but as we say in the States, you get what you pay for.

It's actually quite interesting how a such a normal school lunch can look disgusting for someone else. And then again we in Finland are surprised to see school lunches including potato chips, hamburgers, pizzas and even candy. It's also a surprise for me that in some countries/schools you have dessert everyday with your lunch. We rarely have dessert at school in Finland and when we do it's usually on a peasoup day (and on a Thursday, then we can have pannukakku (http://img.mtv3.fi/mn_kuvat/mtv3/koti/ohjelmat/makuja/ruokakuvat/syksyn_reseptit_2008/588411.jpg).

There's a couple of reasons why I think this meal looks a bit strange.

1st - the color of the picture is a bit off. It's all a bit too dark, as you can see by the buttermilk, which should be white but looks greyish in the picture.

2nd - integral pasta spaghetti are a bit darker than normal spaghetti, due to the fact that they contain whole wheat..

3rd - I might be wrong, but the Bolognese looks more like the Ragù alla bolognese I make at home, which is like the italians do their Bolognese. It's not made from "hamburger" meat/minced meat/ground meat but from meat that's pot roasted 'til it nearly falls apart on itself. There's a lot of vegetables in the sauce too. And it hasn't this bright red look that the "hamburger" meat/minced meat/ground meat Bolognese usually has..

So, from the pure optics, the meal does indeed look a bit weird. I'm sure it looked better in reality. ;)

I don't think it looks disgusting! I think the processed burgers and pizza look way worse. This looks like real food, and good for Finland for teaching children how to also be POLITE about the food they are being served. This is something Americans can be horrible about.

Hi!I think that sour milk is almost same as butter milk. Crisp bread is very hard to descripe. It's mostly eaten in Finland and Sweden. You can read about it from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisp_bread'

In finnish schools that "bolognese" sauce doesn't contain much tomato (maybe not at all) so it isn't that red bolognese usually is. In fact in our school I think it's called just minced meat sauce. It's not the world's best food but it's still free for us (our parents pay taxes so they kinda pay for our lunches afterall) and I have to say that pasta with minced meat sauce is one of the favourites in our school also (our pupils are 13-15) while pyttipannu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyttipanna, traditional finnish pyttipannu looks like the one in the lower picture) might be the number one of all favourites. Yes, we REALLY don't have pizza, hamburgers etc etc.

That pyttipanna really looks good - kinda like something I sometimes prepare, just that I don't use meat leftovers, but Blutwurst (german version of Black Pudding) and I don't put a fried egg upon, but scramble it inbetween. Looks very strange, but tastes quite well with some beet root slices or gherkin ^^

Like the wikipedia page said, nowadays it's also made from fresh ingredients but in the beginning first pyttipannus were made of leftovers. Fried egg on the top of pyttipannu is some kind of old tradition, e.g. in school we don't have egg with it, and thank god we don't 'cause I don't like eggs. Usually we eat pyttipannu with ketchup, those who don't like ketchup or don't like pyttipannu with ketchup eat it just plain.

Many schools organise after-school activities (music, sports etc. or even homework clubs) that kids can attend for a small fee. For the fee they also get an afternoon snack. Or kids may have their lessons at music schools or sports practice right after school hours. Some have older siblings who look after them until parents come home. Some may even go home alone and then play with their friends during the afternoon. That's what we normally did in the 1980's when I went to school.

Actually in Finland it is more usual that both parents work full time. If there are younger siblings mom (or dad) may stay home for a couple of years (until the youngest is 2 or 3), but there are hardly any stay-at-home moms. When I went to school, I often went to my friend's home to play and maybe do some homework and we were alone until her parents came. (My dad was a teacher so he came home about the same time as I.)